Okay, so it doesn't do everything you want it to. Truthfully, it
doesn't do much of anything. But the very fact that it was invented
should give us all reason to celebrate the promise of a better
future.

Before I tell you what it is, I should note its august pedigree,
because many of us have thought such a thing impossible, the way
mankind once thought flight or landing a man on the moon or
frosting a Pop-Tart so that it doesn't melt in the toaster
impossible.
Yes, it is of that caliber. And so it took the extraordinary IQ
wattage of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - one of the
nation's premier institutions of higher learning, a laboratory for
brainiacs, a veritable briar pit of brilliant minds - to develop
this device, an invention so fundamental to the improvement of the
species that its true value will become apparent only in years to
come.

The device is called the Jerk-O-Meter.

Throughout history, identifying a jerk has been subjective. At this
stage in human development, we must resort to rolling our eyes,
shaking our heads, raising our hands to the heavens in the
universal "Why, oh, why must I work with this guy?" plea.

True, we - and here I regret I must use scientific terminology and
note that I am speaking specifically of Homo sapiens - have evolved
to being able to recognize a jerk from a nonjerk. But we Homo
sapiens - including, and here is the problem, jerks - have not been
able to put that final piece of the puzzle into place: proving
without doubt or argument that someone is a jerk.

But thanks to the Jerk-O-Meter, all the guesswork is gone. Soon,
we'll be able to quantify jerkism. We'll prove scientifically that
a person is a jerk (or, at least at that moment, lapsing into
jerkocity).

Before continuing, I suppose I should tell you how the Jerk-O-Meter
works.